Seth Abramson

James Franco By James Franco By Seth Abramson

I.

I am a teacher,with wires you can’t see but feel.You were all those things from beforeobstacles, pollution, and debris.In the pool we went at it.You got big and drunk and weird,corroded by my love.I knew by thenmy character was the teacher.

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I was once the young brooder, unhappy. I was more interested in me riding her from behind like when a hurricane comes through and takes out houses. It was the sweetest thing from today’s celebrity age, but that world is unwieldy and can hurt you.

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Think of that, son: Because one of the babies fucked her, guys like grown men take over. But sometimes the materialistic demons along the shore, the trash pushes them downstream and leaves them in the ocean as if they were cardboard. They are the manmade things. (It was their first sex scene, they had taken shots in their trailer.)

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I assume things will pile in life. Could you comfort him and pile until the piles become frail and busted? When his face was readjusted your dad said not to worry: You have a bunch of mice at home, you can handle anyone at that school (every once in a while they drag you out between takes, while they reset the lights and fill you with such pressure things are washed clean).

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I’ve done fifteen years of movies— huge black ones that you never saw before— not knowing why. But now I know everything she loved about my work: The girls were drunk to be in a movie that critiqued “the beautiful blonde one”; the actresses were enthusiastic and sweet, half her size, with barely any hair.

They were so happy! Their world, rather than added, stayed in my arms and told me.

II.

There’s nothing like the energyon the high seas!Young menwere put togetherfor their educationback in the thirties.(Think of the sand,and it makes sense to act.)

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When you’re an artist,sailing with demons,a whole cultureferments into great art.I read it on the beach:“Who decided thatkids do nothingwhile fiction is made up?”When something is taught,there are roles for young people.

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I used to think history(and I read it alone)was good to know.Until the nineteen sixties.

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When I was young,we had to worry.My favorite partof the young—I thirst for it—is the truth.

Something else isn’t taught:From the nineteenth century on,if you acted queerat an age when your experience was limited,many people in the States—as long as you didn’t speak—thought they knewand were taught nothing.

(And even still, Be Straightis the name of the Book.)

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Did you learn aboutwho we have sex with?Sleep together, and roamin those rough sheets!

Unless you mean happy—unless it has a frame—is the beginningwhat was good to know?

III.

I make a living putting on masks,using real people to breathe.(“She had cancer.” “She was black.”)Performing from a script,I learned how to tie some knots.You were the first,like nothing before or since.A minimalist artwork.

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This is my text:the wall between audiences.(A new American way offalling in love with an actress.)

Life and theater are the same person in two bodies. They’re identical, but they want to be famous for a living.

Deep life on the flickering film— what an amazing trip it would be! The rigging! The fishing!The bosun and the deckhand,they would’ve kissed!

(But both?)

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Out on the sea for months and years,everyone sleeping below deck in hammocks,sometimes my feelingsshare their women.

I am a performer from Atlanta, fucking with the camera in a place in the sun. The longing that everything would be okay, there must be books on it. And performers as potent as live actors recreating dead.

(There are also many books that were never written about what happened on all those ships.)

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Something scary: A box with a stage.

Material. Scripts. Plays. Are recreations what last?

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Because I can(because of your latent power;because you played your character inyour handsome mask)I like to blur the separationof different kinds of people.(If they’re never apart,it’s all they talk about.)With my own feelings animating them,they get the better of me and I forgetmy character is kissingsorrow. And sociopathic.

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Well, shit, we’re just kids.

IV.

These poemsdeepen the pathwaysthat I don’t haveagain and again, until the paper runsand the whole metal thing moves.(So much hubris, administering to its patients!)

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I am to rest and write well and die:that’s what we want in a man. He who writes is the one I see the world through. (“Which grid undergirds these streets?”) With my machine, the Greats fall. Great! I am a vessel holding all their thoughts! Buzz about my enclosure like blood!

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Mark these streets: they’re the manifestations of a wild mind because they’re the brutes everyone knows. (Is the one sublime? And as forgettable?)

The history of my city: a black man and a white woman— he was sixty-three, I was thirty— destroyed by handsome brutes. (That’s me, looking out inside the bus.) One sees,

like a child drawing over lines—(terrible!)— whose father was a poet. And whose mother went in wife-beaters and oiled hair. By throwing a body and wrestling with its crude incarnations— is he the bull? The ballerina?— I see myself among the mathematic whom.

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There’s a relationship between “about” and “a frame.”

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Art has to author its form. I am a thing of parts, and these people:

1. He has a swagger. (And an attitude!) 2. Thin (next to his favorite dictum). 3. His thoughts sit; he’s standing.

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Because everyone treats me as the history of me— a thing-in-itself I carve— instead of performances there’s a fake version of me I remember. When I first watched, I thought I had discovered him! He has the strength of all that, America!

V.

There is a surface that is so attractive I wish I could turn and shout across the house, “The willed man seems to pop through the roles we’ve created! How do you get to him?” (He’s so energetic and wild, I fell straight in love with him—on scene!)

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Now, I realize that I am understood because of the intensity roles offer. Working their submission into bodies—there’s a discipline!— others start complaining: “And he doesn’t know the moves that we all make together!” But if you think craft comes from art, you’re the fools! I love a woman

who does many things I don’t laugh at. Her art comes from framing a living person

with a singleness of purpose. (Bye, measured temper! Bye, beacon of such defined edges!) How can you help but think she’s no fool anymore? (On the gray bed, she did all that is usually found in music. I’ll never forget, Johnny Boy.)

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I once wondered how little I can give. (Who called? My father. Five times a day. He gained eighty pounds and watched every film. I played his son, once.)

I should have focused on the face of the human landscape: sculptures! They’re dancers and their instruments, a smile in a dog’s head. Man, heed tombs! An angel’s width and wallop! Film and its failed landscapes, the glutted world, scions never seen again, the dear dead hunter, and awe!

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The plaque became a whole man.

The man seemed divorced from this.

Who would ever understand his work, except through the sharp etches—lies— he thought were real? (They spoke to him.)

VI.

Well, death, be my sleep in my parents’ old bedroom, paper the blue and white wall with the phone I’d play with, a dog I never had, my father’s middle name. I was a toy until people had to call area codes. Once day appeared— bags carrying my poor face!— “Get up to eat!” (And only my father’s father was a drunk!

He said he was raised by cats.) And then: “Mother! Father! My sketch! And wet paint!” (That was a big one.)

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All the games and all the roles— so many numbers to remember! I work up my resistance. (I’m a cat, man— because they don’t need to fight over the numbers every night, like a runner I knew from pictures, slower forward than going.)

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Because my father hated all he wanted to do— don’t know how— when my father passed, I knew “significant” had died.

(I’d lie him on the bed, but I’m a creature—nocturnal as hell.)

Because he loved me so, and that was sad, I run through books and I’m here to cheat. And in time I’ll go like the rest.

But I was thinking: What was possible? I push it back as far as a lifetime of luggage, like fifty years, and in forcing it back I sleep-fight like it’s a sickness.

•

All of my life, I stayed in. If, in the city, you can see time and exhaustion (they’re so nice!), now you don’t have to remember anybody. (“Hardly knew him!” I used to say that.) And no one working a circle between his fingers saw that all of the motions— and I clean them, lover, like a dark man with a beard— we’re sucked into. (His Life, His whole.) Off to watch them play, or give up their shit— because they live!— I sleep all day.

Note: “James Franco By James Franco By Seth Abramson” is a long-poem remix of James Franco’s chapbook Strongest of the Litter (Hollyridge Press, 2012). Each line of Section I is taken (in whole) from one of the following four poems in Strongest of the Litter: “Florida Sex Scene,” “Seventh Grade,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” or “Montgomery Clift.” Each line of Section II is taken from “Art School,” “Historical,” “Whales,” or “Gay New York”; each line of Section III is taken from “Fifth Grade,” “Theater,” “Double,” or “Montgomery Clift”; each line of Section IV is taken from “Fake,” “My Name Is Paterson,” “Paterson History,” or “Marlon Brando”; each line of Section V is taken from “Paterson Love,” “De Niro,” or “Blue Being”; and each line of Section VI is taken from “Animals,” “Death,” “Nocturnal,” “Telephone,” or the chapbook’s Table of Contents.